


And All the Sinner Saints

by DesdemonaKaylose



Category: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac
Genre: Caliginous Romance | Kismesis, M/M, serial killers in love, what a beautiful animosity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-27
Updated: 2015-02-27
Packaged: 2017-11-13 03:31:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/498979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesdemonaKaylose/pseuds/DesdemonaKaylose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It must be something about their city that makes murder seem like a viable problem solver. Jimmy and him, they're both artists, part of that elite caste of bright eyed visionaries who leave the streets red and naked and beautiful. Jimmy doesn't know what Edgar's story is, or exactly what the guy wants from this, but he does know one thing: some day, he'll see that fucker bleed. It'll be so romantic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Sympathy for the Devil

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Stomiidae](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stomiidae/gifts).

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Just as Every Cop is a Criminal
> 
> (And All the Sinners, Saints)

At first, Jimmy thinks that it's another of Johnny's. Why not? How many axe wielding murderers can be running around a single city, even a city as fucked up and carnivorous as theirs? He smells the blood before he sees it, the ugly stench of a cleaved body underneath it, and his stomach flutters. His heart breaks out into a near seizure. The smell is coming from an alley just ahead, trash cans knocked over on their sides so that their glinting metal rims just barely peek out past the grime-covered brick, almost coquettish.

His fingers spasm too, nervous energy dancing from one tip to another. He breaks into a run, stupidly hoping that _he'll_ still be there, basking in the kill, too caught up in the moment to run away. At least coattails, Jimmy would be satisfied with one glimpse of the flare of coattails as a murderer slips away into the echoing night. Just one flash—

Jimmy skids to a stop at the mouth of a perfectly motionless alley. Not even the wind stirs up dirt on the cracked cement floor.

He sighs. The body lies in a messy heap just a little ways away, and he kicks over to it determinedly. It's still something, he thinks as his heart sinks a little, it's still something. A beautiful murder laid out for just him, a canvas painted in darkness and blood—scent thick and tangy in the air—and him the first to see it. That's something. It sings deep in that part of him that knows, just _knows_ , that this is fate and time is only drawing the two of them closer step by step. It's a beautiful thing.

A hand reaches down carefully, lifting up the chin of the subject with the press of white knuckles. A part of him is anxious to run his hands over the outlines, feel the soft edges of the seeping blood, but he knows he's in the records and he can't afford to leave hand prints all over this fantastic corpse. It's frustrating, holding back like this. He wants to touch everything, _feel_ everything, be part of this—

He notices something weird. There's a hole in the corpse's palm, a small round hole. Johnny doesn't usually go in for the subtlety, not that he's seen, at least. Slashes and gashes and wild broad brush strokes that Jimmy usually associates with, like, fucking Van Gogh or some other crazy motherfucker who slapped paint on a canvas. Wild and relentless.

He wraps the edge of his shirt around his hand and lifts up the oozing, dead palm. The hole is methodical, careful even, perfectly round as far as Jimmy can tell in the dim lighting. Was it a bullet wound? A screw maybe? Or maybe a…

Nail.

Bingo.

He picks up the nail, glittering black. This isn't like anything he's ever seen from Johnny before. He looks at the corpse's face again, looks at the expression of mute, resigned horror. That's different too. Your average kill is a spectacle of frozen rage, or animal terror, and there's something icy and sinister here.

Jimmy licks his lips.

Could be a fluke. Could be an off night. Could be…

He spots a flicker in the corners of his vision and whirls, metal tips on his boots nearly striking a ring of sparks on the concrete. A figure disentangles itself from the shadows—fuck, how had he not seen that, goddamnit how was he ever going to catch Johnny if he couldn't even—and looked at him. Light traced half-aborted circles around the rims of some unseen glasses.

And Jimmy could see pretty much shit in the darkness, but he had this sensation like wind sluicing down the collar of his jacket, scraping white ice fingers down his spine. This sensation of being _smiled at_.

And then the figure disappeared, and fuck, _fuck_.

Where the hell was he going to find a girl at this time of night?

-x-

Time passes, but Jimmy doesn't forget.

Maybe a month later, Jimmy goes after a hooker. Typically he tries to avoid that route—it feels like cheating, it's too easy and impersonal. It's like using cliff notes on a final. Better to hold off, wait for somebody _perfect_ , some empty cavernous shell of an American sweetheart, all oozing smiles and makeup masks. That's the real thing, ripping back the layers to find that ugly candy center. Hookers are, in a way, something he's pretty okay with.

They wear their ugly like a stale perfume, what you see is what you get.

But tonight he's desperate for something to fill the emptiness where Johnny's shadow usually hides—he hasn't seen so much as a flutter of the murderer in weeks, and when he goes this long without a brush he starts to sober up, come down from the high, really lose his grip on the thin thread leading him out this dump of a labyrinth that passes for his life. If Johnny won't come to him, even as a specter, then he'll bring himself to Johnny. Figuratively anyways.

He gets her by the throat at the edge of an alley. Normally you have to pay first if you want to avoid the wrath of some pissed off pimp, but this one is a newbie and she's wandered off from the herd. Perfect. Jimmy indulges in a Big Bad Wolf half-fantasy as he drags her off into the darkness.

He almost doesn't notice at first, intent as he is on getting bruising fingers over every inch of soft human skin in reach, but a shadow enters the alley behind him too. Jimmy already has his knife out, below the line of sight (he prefers that his girls fight him, because it feels like a _real_ murder that way. Can't have them getting spooked) when everything goes belly up. The figure approaches, a flicker in his peripheral vision, and by the time he realizes what's happening there's already a swift blow bearing down at his head. _Jesus fuck._ It's a good thing the knife is out, as it happens, because he has just barely enough time to swipe an ugly wet line up the figure's side before rolling off the girl and retreating.

Of course the girl's out of there before you can blink; no hooker's dumb enough to sit still in an alley with two armed and dangerous men.

Jimmy nearly growls, lips skinning up from his crooked teeth. The figure watches him impassively, backlit into a silhouette by the light from the street.

"You just cost me my dinner," Jimmy informs him, fingers tensing on the gritty concrete. He could take this fucker down, do something different tonight. He's mad enough that it sounds like a really tempting option.

"Dinner?" the stranger echoes, head tilting slightly. "What are you, a vampire?"

Something twists in Jimmy's expression, and he thinks he's grinning now. "In the sense that I'm draining the fuckin' diseased lifeblood out of this city, sure, yeah."

" _Really_."

"Really."

The figure steps a little closer, graceful, and light flashes off the rims of his glasses.

"Go home, little boy," he says, and the nearly helpful tone in his voice has Jimmy seeing red. "Save your wrath for someone who deserves it."

"You just cost me my mark and you wanna tell me to go _home?_ I'll show you a fuckin' _little_ _boy_ , condescending mothefucker!"

"Ah," the stranger replies, shifting so that the long blade—is that a machete? Really?—that was hidden under his coat catches the light as well. "But you also cost me _my_ mark, tonight."

And then it clicks. This is him. This is the one who got the man from last month, the one with the nails. This one is an artist too.

Something sweet and electric sizzles through his rage, and Jimmy reevaluates the moment.

"We coulda shared," he says, after a moment. Slowly, he slips to his feet. "I'm a generous kinda guy. I don't mind."

The stranger shifts closer, and what little of his face is visible seems to be curved into something like amusement. "I'm afraid that _I_ am not," he smiles. "And I do mind."

That's like a snap from a rubber band, a nasty itching, painful surprise, and Jimmy doesn't like it one bit.

"Maybe I _will_ kill you," Jimmy hisses, and between the step forward he takes now and the slow shift nearer that this fucker's been making all along, they're hardly an arm's length from each other. "Maybe I'll rip your throat out and take those stupid glasses home with me. Put 'em in the old trophy case."

"Maybe I'll kill _you_ ," the man says mildly. "Carve out your pretty eyes and leave you a sainthood."

Jimmy squints at the guy. Did he just get called "pretty"? What the _fuck_? Is this motherfucker making fun of him, after he was all gracious about extending professional courtesy here?

"I have no _fucking_ clue what you're talking about, but I'd like to see you try."

"I'm sure you would. Go home, little sinner. Better luck next time."

Jimmy strikes. His knife catches the tip of the stranger's clavicle, metal nicking bone, and the stranger ducks aside in one smooth motion, swings up with his weapon out, and the round curve of his swing slices through the empty air where Jimmy's cheek used to be.

They whirl.

Like dancing, where every step is a red-black sliver blossoming across the skin of your partner, and every twirl is a wild race for footing, every swing ratcheting up the tempo until the world fades into a dizzy nothing.

"You'll make one ugly fucking corpse," Jimmy sneers, barely missing the soft skin under his opponent's eye.

"And you'll make a beautiful one," the stranger complements, light arcing across his lenses as the toothy edge of his blade makes a bid for Jimmy's left hand.

This can't last forever. A knife fight is a volatile thing, like a caged hurricane, or a wine glass full of acid. Probably, this will end with one of them dead and the other mutilated beyond repair, and in the moment of a lightening perfect strike, Jimmy figures he's actually pretty okay with that. Not a bad way to go, if it's him who goes. And it probably will be, because this asshole is better than Jimmy would prefer to give him credit for.

Jimmy misses a step, when his foot comes down on the compact mirror his mark left behind in her haste to escape, and he goes tumbling down in a twist, spine and knees and elbows all mixed up and flaring with red hot pain where they hit the ground. The stranger is on him in the same second, landing knees-first and crouched over his twisted body, toothed metal positioned perfectly for a final, neat sawblade motion over the heart of Jimmy's throat.

Neither of them moves. Except for the heavy rattles of breathing, the alley is perfectly still.

"Well," the mysterious figure hums.

"Well," Jimmy mimics.

He can see the swell in the stranger's torso as he steals thick breaths, the hard lines of his collar bone, his jaw, his nose. Lips are half-curved in something like a smile. Winds whistles past his teeth. Up close like this, Jimmy has a passing thought that he may have passed over-hasty judgment on the man's theoretical corpse.

It would be him with the sexy cadaver, not Jimmy.

"It seems we are at an impasse," the stranger says, and carefully he reaches his spare hand down to run a fingertip across the flat of Jimmy's knife, the which is currently being pressed tight against his belly.

Jimmy grins.

"So what now?" he asks, pressing the knife a little harder.

The other man lifts a single eyebrow. "Introductions," he says. "My name is Edgar. Edgar Vargas."

"Jimmy. Mmy for short."

"Ah," Edgar Vargas replies, and the sound is _almost_ a laugh. "Fancy a murder-suicide, Jimmy?"

"Who's the murder and who's the suicide?"

"Well, obviously you would be the suicide. I'm clearly at the advantage here, which makes you the party with most to lose."

"Bullshit. I've got a knife in your gut."

"And I have one to your throat."

"Touché."

They grin at each other. There's a blinding, crazy moment where Jimmy almost does it—almost stabs the smug fucker through the stomach—and his fingers twitch on the grip while he's struggling with the impulse. It would be a good way to go, but he's not ready to go yet.

Edgar sees that he's not going to do it, must see, because he very carefully withdraws his blade and—even though it's an empty gesture, they both know it would take him half a second to crack Jimmy open from any distance—Jimmy reciprocates, pulls back too. Warm spots are seeping through Jimmy's jeans where the taller man's legs are pressed up against his sides.

Edgar looks at him. He's got this look that's like a drill tearing Jimmy open, smearing blood and bits of bone around his deepest secrets. Jimmy stares back.

"I'm going to kill you," Edgar says, as if he's deciding right there on the spot. "But tonight I'll have to take a raincheck."

"Uhuh."

"If it's any consolation," he adds, "I'm very much looking forward to it."

"You know, you're gonna feel like a tool when it turns out I kill you first."

"I doubt it."

And then he's gone. One liquid movement and the stranger is standing over him, taking carefully calculated steps to bring him back towards the mouth of the alley.

He says nothing, no parting shots or goodbyes. He only looks at Jimmy, keeps looking even as he's stepped into the light and become nothing but a looming featureless shadow. His stare burns Jimmy's skin.

Jimmy does not go home that night, not for a long time.

-x-

Days pass. He spends the first few nights jumpy, refusing to leave his room on the third floor of the apartment building. Suppose Edgar followed him home? That's what Jimmy would have done, if he'd taken the advantage. The rain-check could come at any time, any hour, and he was determined to take the advantage his time. Show that fucker how it felt to have his back on the ground. Make him like it.

But days _do_ pass, and nothing comes of it, and Jimmy sinks into a quiet seethe.

The following Saturday he stomps out of his apartment, ready to fuck something or someone up and not caring much who or what that might be. There's an apple waiting at his door and he nearly trips on it—he goes down like a tipped cow and nearly re-breaks his nose, Christ he really needs to sleep more, it's starting to be a real problem—and lands face-first next to it. God damn old lady Jenkins and her god damn fruit. He never asked for her charity.

He picks the thing up and takes a massive bite out of it. One of these days he's really gonna—

 _Holy fucking shit his mouth is bleeding what the hell is_ happening _?_

He spits out the apple, catches the chunks of yellow flesh streaked pink and red with blood in his hand. Something glitters. There's something in his apple.

Jimmy's heart flutters.

There's a razor in his apple.

-x-

It's weeks before the next time he sees Edgar.

He's at a bar. Jimmy tries not to leave his place more than necessary, because, you know, there's _people_ out there and they just make him want to do things that would end someone like him (inexperienced, hardly more than a student, really) in a long and boring lifetime behind bars.

But tonight he feels like being social, although it'll probably end badly. It always does. He's not sure why he even bothers, maybe he just enjoys making himself miserable. He shrugs on a coat—his columbine coat, he calls it, thinks that's pretty clever—and hits the streets, wandering windbitten concrete valleys until he finds somewhere appropriately vague and dim to get himself a drink. Used to be that he went to the nearby goth venues, the ones where you sat and glared at your drink and tried to out-aloof your friends, but lately those places just make him angry. Little kids playing little kid games, ignorant of the infinite black miracles unfolding on their own streets.

Anyways, he's legal now, might as well go somewhere they'll actually card him.

Inside the bar, there's a smoky haze hanging around the rafters, and it seems like the kind of places that hasn't got a real clientele type. He settles on a stool and taps the counter, orders something cheap. If remembers to feed himself tomorrow, he'll be glad he didn't break the bank tonight.

Just as he's finishing it off, a second glass whips across the countertop towards him and he reaches out instinctively, snatches it up.

"From the guy down there," the barkeeper grunts, jerking a thumb towards the far end of the bar. "The one with the soul patch. Friend'a yours?"

A tingle shoots through Jimmy's veins, starting on the skin at the back of his neck and skating down the length of him to gather buzzing in his fingers. His mouth goes dry.

The bartender never gets an answer. Instead, Jimmy takes his drink and stands—heart is racing, he hopes he's not going to lose feeling in his knees and keel over, that would be stupid—and moves across the room to where Edgar is sitting, one lazy finger tracing the rim of the shot glass in front of him.

"Come here often?" he quips, slipping into an empty seat. "Do you buy drinks for all the guys you plan to kill?"

The man looks at him. "Only the ones who tried to kill me first."

"Next time let me have my mark, you territorial fuck."

"Next time, stay in the kiddie pool and let the adults take care of things."

"If we weren't in public right now—"

"You mean, if I didn't have a knife in your balls right now."

"Yeah, allow me to return the favor."

"I'd be insulted if you didn't."

They glare at each other.

After a moment, they both grudgingly draw back their weapons.

Jimmy turns back to the bar and takes a sip of his drink. Hell, it was free, and unless the bartender was in on this whole thing, it probably isn't poisoned. And somehow, he suspects Edgar is the kind of guy who'd rather chew off his own arm than ask someone to hand him a key.

"So," the younger man starts, "how come you wimped the fuck out on our murder-suicide, Vargas? Remember you left some cookies in the oven?"

"I didn't exactly see you jumping to get us killed, either," Edgar notes. He's got this smile like he knows something Jimmy doesn't. "As much as I would have liked to try, unfortunately I have quite a lot of unfinished business ahead of me."

"It's not the kinda business you wear a tie for, is it?"

"Not any more than yours is," Edgar responds dryly.

Something about that makes Jimmy's heartbeat stutter. They're the same. He knew it.

"What's your _deal_ , anyways?" Jimmy asks, at last, because it's been bugging him for weeks now. "What makes you think you've got the right to waltz in on a guy's kill like you own the place?"

"I'm on a mission from Gahd," Edgar drawls, in this flat nasally accent that reminds Jimmy of Chicago, and it's probably a reference to something but he has no idea what.

The older man waves one hand at the bartender and says, "Another round for me and my business associate."

"Wait, no, seriously, give me a fuckin' answer," Jimmy demands, dropping an elbow onto the countertop. "Don't you blow me off!"

"Why not?" Edgar retorts, reaching out to take the glasses from the bartender. "You're nothing but a brat with a fetish for bloodshed, and I certainly don't owe you any answers."

"I am _not_ a brat," Jimmy says with a scowl, snatching away his drink. He has no idea what it is.

"You are," Edgar replies, almost serenely. "You're a brat and a monster and an awfully shitty excuse for a human being."

"I'm going to cut off your limbs and sodomize your corpse."

Edgar winks. He fucking _winks_. "I'd like to see you try."

Jimmy is actually speechless, and that's not something that happens very often. Probably one for the record books. The amber liquid in Edgar's glass sloshes as he lifts it up, offers it like a toast.

"To sinner-saints," the murderer says, white teeth and round, white lenses. "Good men for evil work… and vice versa."

After a moment, Jimmy lifts his glass as well.

Good enough for him.

-x-

Jimmy tracks him down. It takes work, but when you know a guy's full legal name there's no way you can lose track of him permanently. And part of him _is_ surprised that he got a real legal name, but that's just another thing about Edgar, isn't it? He doesn't lie.

He also doesn't have a lock on his door, come to find out. It's not even that he forgot to lock it. It actually has no locking mechanism.

Jimmy slips in some time around three in the morning. The weight he's dragged along is cumbersome, but he's too high on adrenaline to care. This is going to work. This is going to be perfect. He's done his research, put in the motherfucking hours so he could pick it just right and he's got this sick-wicked feeling in his gut like he's slowly scratching off the numbers to the jackpot of his life digit by painstaking digit.

He finds Edgar's bed quickly and unwraps the package, reassembling the pieces in tidy, quick motions. He has no idea how long he's got.

 _There._ The last section hits the sheet, and Jimmy spares a moment to evaluate his work. If this one doesn't make Vargas's blood boil, he doesn't know what will.

When he leaves, he leaves the fully remastered version of Renee Montoya, Edgar's mark for tonight, lying in bits across the bed.

-x-

The night Jimmy comes home to find his walls smeared with neat red letters, he drops his ratty grocery bag and sits down in the doorway like someone cut his legs out from under him.

He doesn't get up for god knows how long.

It isn't until the words start to blur together in a crazed, last ditch attempt to escape the damaged confines of the English language that he finally makes a move, struggles to find his muscles again, and dares step closer to the oxidizing wall. Brown crumbles under his fingers, on the letters near the top, where the drips and bubbles have been sitting the longest. At the bottom, the strokes are still red as fucking fire.

He goes to sleep with lips redder than a stripper's, and sure as goddamn hell that he's not sorry.

-x-

 _I'll see you screaming,_ Edgar's written on his windowless, colorless wall. _Wait for me_.

Retribution is in order, and Jimmy has a hundred ideas. The world is doused in syrupy sweet redness, bright and exciting like it's never been before, full of sharp edges that make him smile for no reason when they catch him. For the first time in a long time, Jimmy thinks…

Jimmy thinks there may be room in his world for more than just him and Johnny. Johnny's still the best, Johnny is still what he wants to be, oh definitely. He's still chasing Johnny. But he wants this, too, and he's fucking well going to _take_ it.

For a while, life is good.


	2. The Horror of our Love

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I've murdered half the town  
> (Left you love notes on their gravestones)

The city is dark.

A river runs along its edges, thin and twice as deep as a man, black and choppy in the evening after the rain has stopped and the pavement above it is puddled in brackish water. Some of the puddles are ankle deep, potholes overflowing with runoff. Break your fucking ankle if you step wrong.

Jimmy takes his chances with them.

Twenty minutes ago he caught a flash of familiar coat as he made his way down a side street, looking for someone to pick a fight with or someplace to get drunk at, whichever came first. Khaki duster, turning the corner up ahead. His breath stuttered in his ribcage.

He's been trailing Edgar Vargas ever since, around street signs and under overpasses, and down to the sickly, rickety edge of town.

His fingertips are sparking and his heart is too fast, and it hasn't slowed down a beat in twenty minutes.

Jimmy thinks he might be fast enough to get close, might be sneaky enough to slit Edgar's throat whenever he finally pauses on his endless fucking trek. A shiver traces its fingers down his ribs.

Stalking is a skill you learn through bloody minded trial and error—nobody's gonna teach it to you, you gotta work the kinks out on the fly. Jimmy's taught himself a hell of a lot since he first saw Johnny, since he first stumbled into all of this. He's motherfucking talented, yeah, but talent won't take you the whole way. For instance, it's taking every single trick he's ever picked up to keep par with Edgar.

He grabs a street sign on his way around a corner, and his fingers slip on cold, wet metal. He catches just a glimpse of Edgar reflected in the slick pavement, orange streetlight and yellow duster, but that's all he can afford. Another shiver skates down his spine, and he's not entirely sure it has anything to do with the weather.

Countless twists and turns later, Edgar finally comes to a stop on top of the bridge that crosses the river, blocky iron railing and a copse of twisted trees half-blocking him from view.

Jimmy's eyes flick over the ground, riddling out a route that will take him under the bridge without being seen. He thinks he can do this.

By the time he reaches the trees, Edgar is nowhere in sight.

Jimmy hisses and kicks the nearest trunk, although he'd really rather shout at somebody. Fuck. Where did he lose the son of a bitch? Nobody moves that fast unless they're… being followed…

But he couldn't have-

There's the delicate slide of a hand over Jimmy's mouth, and then his arm is jerked up into a bend across his back. That's his knife hand. Jesus _fuck_. His shoulder screams at him to make whatever the hell is happening _stop._

He's still got one perfectly good arm free, though, and he's already clawing at the long-fingered hand over his mouth—pressing between the seam of his lips, he ought to just open his teeth and bite down—when a wave of dizziness overtakes him.

In a matter of heartbeats he's gone from being held down to being held up and fuck, fuck, fuck, this was not what he was going for at all. There's faint, warm breath on the shell of his ear. He's gone slack in the joints like someone dug a knife into his nervous system and hacked the line, and his one free hand clutches at the hot skin clapped over his cheek.

"Next time," Edgar's voice murmurs, "don't waste so much time trying to be sneaky. You make it obvious."

Half an hour later, Jimmy comes to on the sidewalk, teetering just over the edge where concrete plummets into a raging, rushing river. His hand is full of nothing.

-x-

That weekend is the first time that Jimmy breaks his own rule and goes after a boy, despite having sworn off anything resembling a fair fight a long time ago.

These two events have nothing to do with each other, of course.

-x-

Jimmy is running from the law.

This is not at all unexpected, or even unusual, for him. His hobbies tend to lean toward a redder tint, and fall a step or two outside of the law. Or, to put it bluntly, Jimmy is a fucking murderer.

Tonight, he got lazy with the gag in a place where he really should have known better. You can't just pick a mark in a nice neighborhood and expect every house on the street to ignore screaming. Downtown? Sure. In the ghetto? Hell yeah. Up in moneybag heights? Surprisingly, yeah, there too. But on a white-picket-fence two-story street? Wouldn't stake your money on it, if you were a gambling kinda guy.

So pink-lipstick-American-Pie screams, and Jimmy barely has time to finish before the blue lights are flashing down the way. A perfect way to spoil an otherwise awesome night.

Jimmy runs. You've got an advantage on the cops if you go on foot, especially at night and dressed in black. He's young and he's fast, and despite being a little drained he's still got plenty of good old fashioned adrenaline—and they're unprepared and probably middle aged, and knowing the pigs in this town, probably more interested in ogling his handiwork on the corpse than chasing through the woods after him.

Not his best work. Haste makes waste, as his kindergarten teacher used to say. The old bitch. Still, it's edgy enough to impress a coupla philistines like the detectives on his casefile. The number he did on the lipstick has some major potential.

So Jimmy runs, and runs, and hops a couple fences on his way between neighborhoods as he heads further towards the thumping, greasy heart of town. Houses get a little smaller. There's a convenience store. Pretty soon, the flashing blue lights are a memory somewhere a dozen crossroads behind him, and the sirens are stilled down to a nervous cricket chirp.

There's a church up ahead, and Jimmy thinks that's a pretty sweet place to hide from the law.

He considers, as he breaks the lock on the door and shoves his way into the unlit building, that he's been getting more and more reckless lately, and he couldn't say why.

The first room is low-ceilinged and has one window, shuttered, so that moving across the floor is like picking his way through an abyss, shifting across the stones at the bottom of an endless well. The glass is blue and black in thin, short stripes. He pushes through the huge double doors and into the main room of the church, whatever you call that, and the pews stretch out in front of him—all blue and black in thin, long stripes. The ceiling is so high above him that it fades into depthless nothing, like the sky on a rainy night.

There's one figure in the room already, front row, head and shoulder silhouetted against the moonlight thrown across the pulpit. It stays motionless, even as Jimmy shifts his boots down the carpeted aisle. Static dies on his rubber soles.

"Well," the figure says, in a voice that flares hot and familiar in Jimmy's ears. "Fancy seeing you here."

"I was in the neighborhood," Jimmy replies, slipping still closer.

"What a pleasant coincidence."

"That's one way to put it, sure."

Jimmy is still edging closer, fingers dancing down the sides of the pews, when Edgar moves for the first time. Blue light paints itself over his glasses, and his barely curved lips. He looks over his shoulder, and Jimmy wonders suddenly if he's ever actually seen the man's pupils. He can't remember.

Figures the slippery bastard would be hanging around in here—the shadows on the wall are making Jimmy's skin crawl, and he sort of thinks that if he looks hard enough, he can make out the sunken wooden eyes on the crucifix suspended over the altar. Edgar Vargas would feel right at home, wouldn't he?

"So, uh," Jimmy says, "what brings you here this time'a night?"

"Didn't you know I would be in my father's house?" Edgar replies, teeth flashing as he speaks.

Jimmy scowls; he can feel it twisting up his face. "Whatever the hell that means."

Edgar shifts, a little further down the aisle than before, tossing one arm over the back of the bench. He smiles, blue teeth and blue glass, and makes the smallest of gestures—a crooked finger, an invitation.

Veins stuttering electric and brighter blue than the moonlight, Jimmy slips into the empty space beside him.

"Been busy, I see," Edgar observes, reaching out with one thin, pianist's finger to smudge the pink lipstick—gray in the darkness—already smeared across Jimmy's lips. His fingertips come back glinting and slick, and he rubs them together thoughtfully.

Jimmy's lips almost burn, and he wonders for a stupid moment whether there was poison on Edgar's skin.

"Hell fucking yeah," he snaps back, words a little dryer than he expected. "How about you, Vargas? Anything to show for the night besides the one man midnight mass?"

Edgar just tips his head sideways, toward the end of the bench where a curve of darkness cuts through the shadow. The pale white length of a hand is nailed to the wooden slat.

"Inelegant, I'll admit," he sighs, regarding the shape like a chef looking over a ruined cake. "But, to err is human. To forgive…"

The man is dressed in black—or at any rate, it looks like black in the dimness—but Jimmy wonders how much of that black is really red. His vague, satisfied smile is absolutely insufferable. He just admitted he fucked up. What's he got to smile about?

Jimmy grits his teeth.

"The real question here," Edgar went on, glasses flashing, "is what a faithless little cunt like _you_ is doing in a church this time of night."

"Call me a cunt again," Jimmy snarls, "go on. I already killed one motherfucker tonight, I don't mind making it two."

"Ooh," Edgar remarks. "That was frightening."

The handle of Jimmy's knife is cold, and it bites into his palm as he snaps the thing out and pushes it down between the black buttons of Edgar's shirt. Skin breaks. Barely.

Edgar's chin tips down, and it's a fair bet that he's looking at the wicked point pressed into the middle of his sternum.

"There we are," he says. If it wasn't completely stupid crazy, Jimmy would think he sounded almost pleased.

When an ice cold point pricks Jimmy's skin, just above the waistband of his jeans, he doesn't even bother to wonder how Edgar got the knife out without his noticing.

"Yes," Edgar sighs, "this is much better. I've never had a decent conversation that wasn't at knifepoint."

Jimmy just squints at him.

"Did you like the cyanide I left you?" Edgar asks him, conversationally, free hand tapping the back of the pew between them.

"Dunno," Jimmy lies, "I never got it. Must have thrown it out with the rest of the trash."

"Shame. It was in a lovely bottle of port, too."

"Yeah. Shame. Must've been hard to get a hold of."

"Terribly."

"How about that bitch I left you," Jimmy asks, "what was her name. Renee. You like her?"

Edgar's smile turns sharp as smashed glass. "She was mine. If you don't stop molesting my flock, I'll have to do something drastic."

"Hey, Vargas, you gotta learn to share. Bet you weren't even gonna fuck her."

Blood wells in hot drops where Edgar's knife twitched just slightly.

"I wasn't," he replies.

"See, that's your loss," Jimmy tells him, flashing a grin that feels like a gash opening up across his face. "Why do you even bother if you're not gonna have some fun with it."

Edgar's gaze flickers for a second, up towards the altar where the shadow of a crucifix is suspended over the glittering silver Eucharist set. "I wouldn't expect you to understand," he answers.

Jimmy bristles. "You wanna try talking to me properly?"

"No, not really." Edgar's hand, the free one that was slung over the bench between them, slips off the curve and down, lands on Jimmy's knee. "I don't think you've got the vocabulary."

Jimmy's leg is thrown up across the seat, half tucked under him, and he can't decide if moving it now would be a sign of chicken-shit cowardice or stone-cold not giving a fuck. While he's grappling with that one, Edgar's thumb is tracing the inseam of his jeans.

"Is it inappropriate," the man murmurs, "to confess that I'd very much like to strangle you in a flagrantly inefficient way?"

"Dunno," Jimmy manages, "you think Jesus might have something to say about it?"

Edgar lifts one eyebrow.

The knife shifts, and in a flash of movement the pinprick tip is digging up into the thin flesh under Jimmy's jaw. A slender pianist's hand has slipped up to thumb the denim crease where thigh curves into body.

When he speaks again, his tone is sweet, barely above a whisper.

"I'm going to kill you," Edgar promises, just like he has every other night.

"Not if I kill you first," Jimmy replies, just like he does every other night.

Of course they're both wrong, although they don't yet know it.


	3. Thou Shalt Not

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In walks the villain of this tale,  
> the door closing softly behind you

Seems like Jimmy is always the last one to understand everything.

When the snow comes in the winter, he finds himself stranded in his cellblock of an apartment with nothing to do and suddenly nowhere to go. He knows full well that the ride he was expecting won’t come now, given previous years’ experience, so he swears for a while at the frost creeping slowly across his window and finally turns his attention to other things. He’s got four tapes and what is quite possibly the tiniest, least impressive television since they finally stopped making black and white tvs in the eighties. He lifts up one in particular, thinks about sin and violence and human nature, thinks about art, and pops it into the built in VHS port. The movie infuriates and fascinates him in turns. He’s in the mood to be frustrated by philosophical jargon and poor imitations of Russian slang.

It’s been months and he’s got nothing to show for any of his efforts. The snow stalled streets outside his window are just another iteration of the same implacable roadblocks he keeps running into everywhere he turns. He can’t shake the feeling that something is _stopping_ him, physically stepping between him and his goal. He doesn’t understand but he feels like the solution _ought_ to be obvious and maybe there are invisible observers just around the corner who are giggling into their fists watching him bash his skull into walls like a rat in a maze. He’s been so close, so many times. He's seen coattails.

This is the state of things on the afternoon that it happens: the snow, the frustration, the sounds of Beethoven transmitted over blown speakers. 

Edgar Vargas bursts through the door of Jimmy’s apartment like a thunderstorm, terrible and dark with unspilled wreckage. There is no warning, nothing to hear over the tinny speakers of the undersized television that is still playing _Clockwork Orange_ even as the doorknob rips a hole in the plaster wall. Jimmy scrambles off the bed in his one room apartment, rolling his ankle on a discarded boot and clawing at the comforter on his way down to the floor.

He hadn’t expected this. For months there had been nothing more overt than a poison apple at the doorstep, a letter in viscera delicately painted across the wall—he had scrubbed away all but the word _wait_ , which hung still in a rusty smudge as dark and terrible as Edgar himself. It never occurred to him that he should have a weapon on hand in his home, or that he should have had an ear turned towards the hallway. There was nothing remotely within arms reach, and the kitchenette was much further away from the floor than it had been from the bed.

When Edgar threw the door open, his khaki coat flared around him. It took him the length of a second to round the bed, and he descended towards Jimmy’s jumbled body with his weapon flashing. Jimmy’s hands were too empty, flat on the ragged carpet and crushing plastic bags underneath them. There’s not gonna be an elegant way to do this, not with Edgar armed and bearing down on him so very fast like the angel of death in all of his sudden unswayable glory, maybe Edgar thinks he’s helpless without his knives, maybe Edgar is stark wrong.

See, the thing is that Jimmy has only recently come into his life’s new purpose. Before that, he had to make due with the teeth and knuckles his body had given him, in the cafeteria and the street and the bloody whirlwind that had been his first shared apartment. He had clawed his way out of those days, but he hadn’t forgotten how to claw.

Jimmy punches up into Edgar, whose own momentum spears him across the bone crux of pointed knuckles. His blade buries in the floor just above Jimmy’s shoulder, slanted tines digging into flesh. He lurches when it finally jerks free. Jimmy blocks another swing with the back of his forearm, keeps blocking even as Edgar buries his fist in his hair and pins him firmly to the floor. _Wrong move_ , Jimmy nearly crows, _now I got two hands free_. Jimmy grabs the wielding wrist and pries it back, realizes that Edgar is not much stronger than him after all, arches up into their grapple and knocks Edgar’s one supporting arm out from under him.

He falls. It’s hard not to think of a mountain leveled by dynamite.

Jimmy rolls him and ends up on top, and after that it’s easy to take the machete and press it just a little too lightly across the solid flesh of Edgar’s neck. It lands like a whisper, a full stop on the dizzy tumble of the last minute. He decides that he likes the contrast, dark metal and flushed skin, the potential energy of a dangerously still object. The man’s hands fall motionless, as soon as the metal touches his skin, and he lets out a sigh almost like relief.

"Sorry for dropping in unannounced," he says. His throat works underneath the jigsaw of his own blade.

Jimmy shifts—his knees are on either side of Edgar’s chest, and he feels as if he’s been suspended above the man by an intangible hook buried in his vertebrae. Maybe that’s a side effect of adrenaline. “You’re in my home,” he says, baring his teeth. “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t kill you now.”

"I was sort of hoping you would try," Edgar replies.

Jimmy is at a loss there.

On the little box of a screen behind them, Dr. Branom is saying _, “Sin? What’s all this about sin?”_ and Jimmy tunes it out as soon as he tunes in. He’s seen it enough times that he can probably recite the entire scene as it rolls past them. Edgar feels the flicker in his tuning, somehow, and he follows the invisible line of Jimmy’s attention back to the television.

"Ah," Edgar says, "that would be just your sort of thinly veiled pornography of violence."

Jimmy wishes he could mute the thing, but it’s not one of those nice televisions with remote controls. It’s not even that it’s on particularly loud, because it isn’t, it’s just that he can’t stand Edgar looking over his shoulder at it, drawing neat little conclusions and parceling off the contents of Jimmy’s past and present and not _looking Jimmy in the eye._

"Slow night?" Jimmy asks. He’s got one hand on Edgar’s chest, holding himself up, and he can feel the heavy thump of a heartbeat through the dress shirt. It feels alive and solid, like something he could get his hands around, like something with weight.

"As a matter of fact, no." Edgar turns his head, pressing one cheek to the floor. It almost looks like a gesture of animal submission, but Jimmy reckons he’s too smart to fall for whatever game is being played here. "It’s been a wretched night and I’m sick to death of everyone I know."

 _"Poor_ baby,” Jimmy singsongs, dipping in close to smile down at the man. “Life must be _so hard_ for you.”

"Our struggles are consecrated," Edgar replies airily, lifting his shoulders in an approximation of a shrug.

"Struggles, hah," Jimmy says. He leans back again. "Like you know pain. With your nice little apartment and your nice little job, and your nice little church, what a _struggle._ Did they shuffle your paperwork upsidedown? Oh, _gee_ , did they forget to refill the stapler?”

Edgar does not move, but his eyes narrow and they seem to Jimmy for a moment like clear lids above a rolling boil, twin windows into a dark and seething heat. “They took away my deaconate,” he says, betraying barely a note of that subterranean burning.

Edgar has never come right out and explained what his damage is--what exactly his crusade is against--but Jimmy knows that there's something wrong with the church, something gangrenous, because Edgar has told him so. Politics, Jimmy suspects, are at fault here. He is dimly aware that Edgar’s job means more to him than a paycheck a month, but the paycheck is the part that interests Jimmy. He wonders what Edgar will do when the money runs out. He gives a little squirm at the thought of Edgar reduced like that, suppressing a shiver.

"What’re you gonna do?" Jimmy says. "Kill ‘em?"

"It wouldn’t change anything." Edgar blinks slowly. "The paperwork is already filed."

"So you’re just gonna take that?"

It’s Edgar’s turn now to show his teeth. “Yes,” he says, “I’m just going to _take_ that.”

"Edgar Vargas," Jimmy says, "the parish bitch."

In a flash of movement Edgar’s hand is around Jimmy’s wrist—his wrist is so small, or else Edgar’s hand is so big—ready to pull him down to the floor again, and only paused in its effort because of the blood that is running, running in a single slow drop, down the solid curve of his neck. Jimmy has sawn a thin sliver of flesh from the skin above his adams apple. Edgar lets his free hand hover over Jimmy’s head, a pointed reminder of how delicately their strengths remained balanced, before allowing it to drop, brushing fingertips over the shell of Jimmy’s ear on the way down.

"That’s going to be difficult to hide," Edgar says, in a voice heavy with an insinuation that Jimmy can barely comprehend. He touches the glistening raw place slowly, deliberately avoiding any sudden movements.

Jimmy’s whole face is burning, he’s pretty sure, from the place where Edgar’s hand brushed and all across his skin. It’s spreading like a toxin in his blood stream. Was there poison? Has he been poisoned? Is this climbing pressure of sensation the last death thralls of a nervous system on the verge of collapse? He takes a deep breath and thinks he can feel his own heart beat in his palms, against the handle of the machete and against the arches of Edgar’s rib cage. Not certain whether his strength is about to fail entirely, he allows his knees to slide out from under him. His hips find a seat over Edgar’s hips.

"Did you just poison me?" he demands.

Edgar’s eyes flutter shut, and then open again with less focus than before. “Of course not,” he says. “I couldn’t possibly poison you without poisoning myself. Don’t they teach anything in schools anymore?”

The man underneath him draw his legs up from the floor, bending the knees, and the upward press of his thighs pushes Jimmy forward, forces him to slide just a little over the juncture of Edgar’s hips. Edgar tips his chin back, closes his eyes again, and Jimmy can’t even bring himself to take advantage of that blatant falter in defenses because if there had ever been a question in his mind whether Edgar understood the horror show of desire building between them, that question has been put to a terrible rest. Edgar’s soft little sigh could have blackened the very walls of his own church.

"I could kill you," Jimmy says, testing the idea out on his tongue.

"You could," Edgar agrees. "You won’t."

Jimmy scowls down at him. “How do you know?”

"You’re a hedonistic philistine," Edgar replies, pleasantly. "And you don’t know how to let well enough alone."

Jimmy grits his teeth and grabs Edgar’s wrist as well as he can, digging nails into the tender inside skin. With enough pressure, he thinks he could pop one of those delicate little veins. He yanks it toward the zipper of his pants, pressing the heel of the palm against himself. He is absolutely not going to frot into someone’s captive hand, but he has to admit it has the appeal of immediate effectiveness. 

"Jerk me off," he says, nails digging deep into flesh. He’s making up for a precarious balance here by pressing a little harder down onto Edgar’s neck than strictly advisable, and he can see tiny new wells of blood springing up under his pressure.

"What a seduction," Edgar remarks, already bring up his other hand to the locus of action.

"Render a complaint to the complaint department," Jimmy snaps. 

Edgar delicately opens him up and slips the erection free. His fingers ghost over the length of it, drawing a wet gasp from Jimmy. 

"Jesus," Jimmy manages. "Aren’t you gonna give me the sin talk, Mr. Former Deacon? How about some protestations here."

"Well I am at knife point, aren’t I?" Edgar says, spreading his open palms. "What can I possibly do?"

He says this with such smug irony that Jimmy is immediately on the lookout for rebellion, but all he can see is a length of sinuous body underneath him, pushing up into him faintly like a patient tide.

"Hands back on the dick," Jimmy says, sharply. "I’m gonna get what I want this time, and you’re gonna give it to me."

Edgar raises one eyebrow. “I think you’re ill prepared,” he says, and jerks his hand once, _hard,_ down Jimmy’s cock. The dry friction—no, he is _not_ prepared—sends such a spasm of aversion and pleasure up Jimmy’s body that his hand opens around the knife handle, reflexively, and it slides to the floor. Instantly Edgar is moving, flipping them over, slamming Jimmy’s back against the ground. He grabs Jimmy’s jaw, spins the machete out of their reach, and kisses him.

Edgar’s mouth is hot, and he kisses like a summer storm, like a hurricane. He’s practically pried Jimmy’s jaw open and is devastating what lies inside, his knees between Jimmy’s knees. When he spreads them, it forces Jimmy’s legs open wider. Okay, so maybe Jimmy _is_ a fucking philistine who doesn’t know when to stop, because instead of scrabbling for the weapon, Jimmy buries his hands in Edgar’s hair and holds him there, so that when he finally has to take a breath it is against Jimmy’s lips, wet and sultry and desperate. He hates to prove the guy right, but he's also really _terrible_ at denying himself anything.

Edgar finally lets go of Jimmy’s chin and expertly props himself up on one arm. He sure seems to know what he’s doing, but Jimmy decides in a fit of spite that it’s just an extension of Edgar’s usual infuriating poise, the flawless kinesthetic awareness that colors his every endeavor. He probably has not had as much experience as Jimmy has. For, you know, given definitions of _experience._

Edgar slides one hand down Jimmy’s neck, thumbing the Adam’s apple with a faint threatening pressure, and then over his chest, over his stomach, two lazy fingers trailing down to the steadily growing hardness between them. Jimmy bites the bastard’s lip when his thumb flicks over the head, half in warning and half in surprise. Edgar laughs. He is literally the _worst._ Jimmy’s decided he’s ready to fucking _go_ when he jams a hand between them, his knuckles knocking knuckles, and grabs the bulge straining Edgar’s slacks. He can feel the hardness through the cloth, the shape and the thickness, wants to palm that weight and hold it. His fingertips are electrified.

With the back of his hand, Edgar pushes away Jimmy’s touch. “Oh no,” he says, “I’m being assaulted, remember?”

"Yeah," Jimmy says, squeezing mercilessly, "you are."

It’s a terrific battle to see who will gain possession of the territory between Edgar’s thighs. Jimmy is aware that this is the pettiest argument they’ve ever had and they’re not even _talking_ for it so, yeah, that’s ten levels of infuriating. But in the end Edgar can’t seem to concede the gains he’s made while ravaging their kiss, and he cannot possibly maintain control of two fronts at once. Edgar turns his tongue into a pillaging force. Jimmy shoves away pants and gets his hand firmly around a beautiful cock. Occasionally you have to pick your battles.

When Edgar comes it is like something terrible has been done to him, he bites down on Jimmy’s lip and breaks the soft skin there as if he’s desperate for anesthetic and trying not to scream. Jimmy grins into the faint flavor of blood and tugs harder, tightening fingers that grow slicker and slicker with each movement until there is nothing left but Edgar’s broken gasps. He’s slumped, his forehead is pressed into Jimmy’s cheek, his breath is coming in labored pants over Jimmy’s jaw.

Jimmy wonders vaguely when the last time had been for him.

Edgar’s hands come up to Jimmy’s throat, spread with the delicacy of butterfly wings over the tubes and fleshy pipes concealed under the skin. “When I kill you,” he sighs, “I’ll kill you like this.”

"No you won’t," Jimmy says, "you couldn’t keep me down."

"I know," Edgar says, mournfully, "but it would be worth trying."

He slides down, all the way down, presses his cheek into the sharp jut of a hipbone. Jimmy hears Beethovan in the alien whine of the blown speakers, sees a glitter of blood on the saw-blade of the knife he can’t quite reach, feels winter like the flutter of a hand on the back of his neck. Edgar’s still-uneven breath breaks over his cock. It’s always been obvious that they were delicately balanced on this tightrope of mutually assured destruction, but now, in the slow trail of fingertips over thighs, it is becoming clear that they are not just suspended here by accident; they are holding each other up, compensating for the capricious wind and their own unstable footing. This can only last as long as they both remain in flux—Edgar will eventually reach the end of whatever deranged crusade he’s intent on perpetrating, Jimmy will find Nny or die trying—but here, in the middle of things, they are dragging each other up with a bloody minded unwillingness to let go.

Edgar shifts. Edgar presses his flushed lips against the head, lays a gentle kiss there, and then swallows Jimmy down like communion wine.


End file.
